


the song remains the same

by bellezza



Category: Marvel (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Aftermath of Torture, F/M, Gen, Nightmares, Past Brainwashing, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-23
Updated: 2014-05-23
Packaged: 2018-01-26 06:38:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,998
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1678433
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bellezza/pseuds/bellezza
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He's going through the world barely waking, trying to put together the pieces of who he was to make sense of who he is now.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the song remains the same

Between the fall and the freezer, between Hydra and Russia and SHIELD, nothing makes sense anymore, not even his own body. But it’s the easiest starting point to try to understand; he’s seen plenty of soldiers lose their limbs, and it’s simpler when he thinks of it that way rather than focusing on what was done to him. A body doesn't require words to be understood -- and words are the hardest part right now -- just clean action, empty of thought.

There are parts of him perfectly at ease with the frightening speed of his left arm, the way it tears through tempered steel and seems to function on its own. But his conscious mind, the part that’s relearning how to be James Buchanan Barnes, has some catching up to do. He can lose himself in the clean cut of a fist through the air, the percussion of impact as it connects with the bag. In the sweat and the shift of muscles beneath skin, his mind stills and he feels something close to alive.

So he spends most of his time in the gym. One whole floor of Avengers Tower is set aside for that purpose, sectioned into rooms lined with smooth polished wood, thick plastic mats, rubber laid down for running. The others are trying to salvage what remains of SHIELD, but he isn’t part of that, not really. He’s here on Steve’s invitation until he figures something out, anything out, because at least being in close physical proximity to Steve is better than sleeping in the cold. He doesn’t know how to fix what’s broken yet, only how to break things more, and at least with the Avengers around him he can be sure the only people he breaks belong to Hydra.

He settles into a rhythm. He wakes up in the grey predawn soaked in sweat and choking down a scream, and he seeks out the empty gym. He works the bags until his body is exhausted and sore enough for him to sleep without dreams, and he wakes again later and tries to fill his waking hours with activity to shut out the memories.

 

 

* * *

 

 

Not all of his dreams are precise recollections of events. Sometimes they come in sensations, in sounds, in disconnected images that make no sense except for how they do. The smell of gunpowder. A bomb detonating, blasting away all sound. Needles in his arms, a thousand tiny pinpricks like bees stinging. The splash of blood on snow.

He wakes one morning aching with the ghost of pain from his nightmare, from the excruciating shock of voltage ripping through his body and the restraints tight around his arms. Sometime during the night he’d had enough awareness to bite down on his left arm to keep from biting off his own tongue, but the taste of metal is close enough to the taste of blood to make no difference. It takes him several long, aching minutes of reciting facts to himself like a child before he’s steady enough to open his eyes.

When he enters the gym half an hour later he’s surprised to find it already occupied. There’s a woman there, bent over one leg stretched perfectly across the mat, her hair a bright shock of color against a canvas of pale skin and dark clothes. Her presence there is so unexpected he stands in the doorway, shocked and silent, for several long minutes. No one else ever intrudes on him during these predawn sessions. He’d almost forgotten there were other people in the world.

“In or out.”

She doesn’t even lift her head to speak to him, doesn’t tremble out of her stretch. Her voice is smooth and even, perfectly flat. The cold, calculating fraction of his mind he knows as the remnants of his programming supplies a name:  _Romanova, Natalia Alianova; alias Natasha Romanoff._  The Black Widow, Avenger. One of his targets. The woman with the garrote on the bridge.

“What?” he says stupidly, and mentally kicks himself.

A note of something - exasperation, amusement - creeps into her voice. “Either you’re in or you’re out. Decide already.”

He shuts the door.

She doesn't pay him any mind after that, moving smoothly from stretch to stretch in a way that's so fluid it's as if she's dancing, so he decides to start his own warm up. He's aware of her in the periphery of his perception in the way he's aware of the cool brush of filtered air on his skin, and thus he's able to shuffle her to the back of her mind and focus on his bag. Every punch connects solidly with the canvas, sending tiny clouds of dust fluttering into the air. He filters the ghosts of his pain down from his mind, through bone and sinew and into his fist until it explodes out of his body every time his fist connects with its target.

There is no machine anymore. There are no restraints, no needles, no mask, no gag. There is him and his anger and his cold, marrow-deep weariness, and there is this violent outlet. And it feels  _good_.

The bag can only stand so much abuse, though, and it's not long until the straps holding it in place snap and gravity takes over. He pauses to catch his breath and remembers Steve telling him how may bags he went through in his first week alone.

He shuffles over to the bench for a towel and finds the woman, Romanoff, standing there watching him.

“We were never properly introduced, those last couple of times you were trying to kill me,” she says with perfect nonchalance, right hand held out to shake. “Natasha Romanoff. James, isn’t it?”

No one calls him James anymore. His parents did, but they've been dead for too many years to count now. Everyone in the present follows Steve's example and simply calls him Bucky.

In a fit of pique he holds out his left, and after a moment Natasha, with a wry twist of her lips, shakes it. “Natasha. Not Natalia?” He’s done as much of his homework on them since Insight as they have on him; thanks to her it hadn’t even been hard.

She doesn’t even flinch at his needling, because she expected as much or because she’s just that good. He’s seventy years out of practice at betting but he’s willing to make a stake on both. She's not a simple woman. “Not for a long time now.”

“Shame,” he says, slinging a clean towel around his neck. “It’s a nice name."

It's the kind of thing the old Bucky would have said to a pretty dame, and there's something about the saying of it that feels both right and wrong all at once. He's not himself. He can work out his pain and his anger on a target, but he still can't fit the pieces of who he is back together.

"You look like you could use a partner," she offers. He meets her eyes and doesn't know how to read them.

"Sure," he agrees and drops the towel to move back onto the mats.

She’s fast, almost too fast for him to keep up without relying on his arm. They’ve only just started and Bucky knows how this fight is going to end, with his face pressed into the mat and her knuckle touched lightly to the vein in his neck, and that’s how it goes. Part of it is that he can’t trust his instincts yet, because his instinct is still to go for the kill.

The other part is that she really is just that good.

She gives the victory a moment before stepping smoothly away and assuming the same anticipatory crouch, one hand out and her head cocked slightly to the side. Bucky slips into a defensive pose this time, watching. Waiting. Being on the defensive gives him the opportunity to study how she moves, but it's not much of an advantage. She's good at feinting, at putting all her body language into making him believe she's aiming left when she suddenly aims right, and when he catches onto that she becomes more direct. And there's her speed still, that impossible quickness as if she's made of shadows.

He sweeps his foot out and catches her behind her knee, driving her down into the mat hard. But catches his fist when he drives it down towards her, twists his arm and her body so her foot drives into his chest instead. She flips him over her head, through the air and onto her back, and she rolls to her feet, all in one clean, fluid movement.

It's almost like dancing. He remembers dancing. It feels like he's done this a thousand times before.

When he winds up on his stomach on the mats again, her knee digging into the base of his spine and her hands pinning both arms against his back in a position that's just shy of being painful, he surprises himself by laughing.

"What's so funny?" she asks. He can't see her face, but she sounds amused.

"Is this your way of getting even?"

She makes an amused, thoughtful sound and presses her knee a little deeper into his back before releasing him and standing.

"If I wanted to get even, you'd be dead."

This time when she offers him her hand, Bucky takes it with his right, and lets her haul him to his feet. Her hand is warm, red and slicked with sweat. She turns and heads back over to the bench, and he follows. She offers him a bottle of water and he takes it, watches her crack her own open with her teeth.

It's suddenly a little surreal, standing here like this with a woman who could kill him if she wanted to. Bucky's not used to contentment anymore, but there's a warm, loose feeling in his muscles, mixing sweetly with the ache of a good workout. With a start, he realizes he didn't think of the table once during the fight. He was rooted, wholly and completely, in the present.

"You're normally here pretty early," she observes. It's not a question. She's paid attention to his patterns. Logically, he knows the others must have as well.

"Neither are you," he replies.

"I'm normally not even here," she says, shifting to sit back on the floor and reaching hands to foot to stretch out her leg. "Avengers Tower was one of Stark's better ideas, but there's too many people around to stay here all of the time."

There are too many people. Most of the time Bucky feels constrained by all of the people here and their watchful concern, his mind buzzing with an hyperawareness of the human presence all around him. It's suffocating and claustrophobic, but it's where Steve is and Bucky has nowhere else to go.

"Well, when you are here," he hedges, and it's ridiculous he should feel nervousness tightening in his belly, "we should do this again."

She answers him with a warm smile.

"Sounds like fun." 

 

 

* * *

 

 

When he returns to his room afterwards, he stops and considers his bed. The sheets are a tangled mess, smelling of sweat and pain. He's exhausted and the prospect of dreamless sleep pulls at him, inviting.

Instead he strips the sheets from the bed and tosses them into the hamper to wash later. He takes a shower, the water scalding hot, combs his hair and dresses in jeans and a tshirt. Then he flips off the lights and leaves, taking the stairs two at a time up to the command room where he knows the others will be, meeting for their morning briefing and deciding what course of action to take today.

The world is a mess, and he helped make it that way. But he's awake now. He's self-aware. He can still remember the pain, still can't shut out the ghosts that crowd him, silently screaming.

But he's slept long enough for a lifetime.

 


End file.
